We went over this week on animated documentaries going over a massive list of them and viewing them. This led ultimately to the question of “Can animation be a documentary”. While some people believe it to be a grey question of half yes half no, I unequivocally state the answer is a Yes. While some people raise an issue that animated documentaries shouldn’t count as documentaries because of the nature of using drawings and not ‘recorded reality’ via a camera this to me is a strange argument to make. Traditional documentaries that make use of ‘reality’ via camera recordings are as prone to creating falsities for the sake of drama or education. Documentaries have been know to reconstruct footage in the editing room to make separate events appear connected cutting between a predator and its prey that in reality were filmed neither at the same time nor in the same location. Documentaries frequently make use of reenactment to convey long since gone events using actors, props and sets and while it is filmed and we see real people one screen it is no more ‘real’ than an animated piece. Even more fundamentally than that is that one cannot ever truly capture reality. When a camera is pointed one way it will miss out on everything else. Things such as distance to subjects, timing, movement of a camera all inform the audience of something and can create relationships that objectively do not exist like a close up of a tiger’s face causing the audience to connect with the creature because of how cute it is.
However Honess Roe points out that Documentary is linked to the notions of realism, not realism itself. That to be a documentary one must merely convince their audiences that was is being seen is ‘real’. Animation can provide that just as well as recorded footage. Using Maitland’s ‘Tower’ as an example it recreates the events of the University of Texas shootings using animation. It recreates the scenarios through the various reports and testimonies of the events. There is your grounding element to ‘realism’ and with that what one sees unfold on screen carries the weight ‘notions of realism’. While of course some audience members could struggle to identify with it was much as they would a traditional documentary that is no reason to deny animated documentaries their status as documentaries. Their imagery is no less real than that of a traditional documentary.